splat chapter ten

Suzie got on I-75 going north. On the way out of Nelson's she had retrieved the paintgun from under her seat, and now had it stowed in easy reach between the seat and her door. It had a full tube of ten paintballs, the same blue as the color of her Superman t-shirt, which was wet under the arms and down the back.

Traffic was moving along briskly, whizzing past on the left at eighty. Suzie drove in the slow lane fiddling with her paintgun. The sky was getting to be the color of road tar in the distance. She could see little purple scud clouds flying by overhead. The leaves of the trees on the side of the road were turning their lighter, absorbent bottoms to the sky in anticipation. Spank me, they whimpered.

She could see a car coming up in her rearview mirror. It was a black Mustang, weaving in and out of cars in the middle lanes. It was doing nearly a hundred miles an hour, flying right up to the back of a car, then violently swerving left or right to get around. No signal. Passing cars like a roach crawling across a chess game.

Suzie put on her signal, checked her mirrors, twisted her head to look over her left shoulder, and then moved over two lanes , pausing to look again before moving the second time.

Driving 101: It is unlawful to cross two lanes in the same maneuver.

Traffic was approaching the exit to 285 now; trucks were piling into the right lanes to go around the city. People were starting to make last minute lane changes. Cars were beginning to put on their brakes as uncertainty spread. She checked her mirror. The Mustang was coming up fast in her lane, and would be pulling past her in a moment. She got the gun ready in her lap, pulled back on the pump, and loaded a ball.  The Mustang closed on Suzie's rear bumper.

She could see the driver clearly in her rearview mirror. It was a teenager. A very young white boy with a sharp chin, a baseball cap on his head. Chomping on gum. Wearing a cigarette between his fingers, steering with one hand. Playing his hip-hop loud. He was still behind her, apparently deciding whether to pass on her left or right. Then he made his move, casually swaying to the right to avoid the passing lane and possible notice by radar-wielding cops.

Driving 101. She quoted the Georgia Driver's Manual from memory: It is unlawful to weave from one lane of traffic to another in order to move faster than the flow of traffic.

Suzie was still in the act of raising the gun when he pulled past her. He never looked at her, never slowed. She shot at his car, even though she knew as she squeezed the trigger that she was going to miss.

But didn't it feel good to be taking action. Not to just sit there and let a dangerous adversary go free. To do something to correct a wrong, even if it was futile. Weaving was the cause of traffic tie-ups. It was the number two cause of accidents on the highway. It was rude, dangerous, and showed a remarkable lack of respect for other drivers on the road. Also, it's stupid to dis someone with a gun.

The shot went wide. Instead of going through the open window and smacking the kid upside the head, as she'd intended, it hit the door post and splattered all over his rear side window. The Mustang continued on down the road, weaving through ever-narrower holes at 95 miles an hour. An old guy in a white Isuzu pickup was the only witness.

Crazy motherfucker got away, Suzie fumed. Goddamn new drivers, disregard all risk and just drive fast because they like to. She felt deflated. There went someone who really needed to be taught a lesson. And she had to let him go because she didn't have a police cruiser at her disposal and could never dream of catching him in her Doohickey. She hit the steering wheel with her fist, her gun lying impotent in her lap. Why do I have to put up with such rinky-dink crime fighting tools? she wondered.

But this pointed up her thoughts of the morning. How were the objects of her notice supposed to learn? How were they supposed to know that she was shooting at them to teach them a lesson? How could she make them understand that she was only trying to get them to slow down, to move from the left lane, to stop driving like it was bumpercars? The sign idea would never work, because most of them never looked her way. She had to come up with a way to deliver an actual message with her punishment.

It started to rain. Dark clouds filled the sky. Travelers switched on their headlights. The first fat drops splashed onto her windshield from the slate gray clouds. Fat raindrops splashed onto the windshields of all the cars traveling with her. Fat raindrops splashed onto the greasy road surface. The road grew instantly slick with water and oil. Urban salad dressing.

A line of fuzzy air appeared a couple of hundred yards down the road as the sky dumped its load on top of them. Trees vanished beyond this line, the road grayed out, tail lights disappeared. Drivers switched on their windshield wipers, then flicked them to high as the skies opened. Everybody panicked.

In Atlanta, three drops of rain and people forget how to cope. It gets even worse with snow. Brake lights came on everywhere; traffic slowed to sixty-five. The real problem with Atlanta traffic is that nobody wants to go slow except old people. So there might be rain, it might be the middle of rush hour, it might be construction, and people were still trying to get ahead of each other so they could get where they were going as quickly as possible.

Driving 101: Most rear-end collisions are caused by following too closely. When following another vehicle on any street or highway, you must stay far enough behind to enable you to stop if the other vehicle suddenly slows down or stops.

Suzie slowed, and paid attention to the road. Visibility sucked, and killing people had to take a back seat to safety.

The old guy in the white Isuzu pickup a quarter of a mile behind fumbled at his belt for his cellphone. He was incensed, red faced, pissed off and righteous, and too excited to punch the numbers. But finally he reached 911. He had to shout to make himself heard over the holey muffler he was too cheap to fix. 'Someone's shooting at cars on the highway...My location? I-75...Going north...Just inside the Perimeter...I'm coming from Griffin, why do you ask?...Oh, I see. No I'm not on the north side of Atlanta. I'm on the south side. Approaching the airport...Yes, it's raining...Anyway, someone in front of me is shooting a gun at other drivers...Yes, I saw the gun...It looks like a shotgun, like a sawed-off shotgun...Well, I can still see the car. It's blue...The shooter? Well, I'm not sure, I didn't get a good look at him, all I saw was the gun...Yes, he had it raised above the passenger seat, shooting out the window...No, I don't think it hit the other car...The driver has black hair...I can almost see the license plates. Let me get closer.'

And the old guy, doing his duty, veered out into the passing lane without checking his mirrors, nearly pulling into the front of a truck full of Mexican workers, who honked and shouted at him. But he had the cellphone to his ear and didn't hear them. He drove furiously in the pouring rain, stepping on the gas until he was going twenty miles an hour faster than he ever traveled.

The truck sure was hard to control at that speed. But with a lot of luck, and skills he'd forgotten he possessed, he got close enough to Suzie's bumper to read off the license tag. 'Okay, I've got it...HSC-710...Yes, I'm sure.' He peered at it again, several times, squinting to make sure he got it right. 'Yes, definitely, I'm certain...HSO-770...Uh huh, Georgia plates...I think it says Fannin County. Or maybe Fayette. It's a little smudgy. It's raining pretty hard...I don't know...No, I'm not wearing glasses. Why do you ask?...I don't need glasses. I'm positive about it. I'm looking at it right now and it's as clear as Christmas. 430-LKO...Okay, sure...It's starting to rain hard.'

'Damned operators,' he muttered to himself, tossing the phone onto the seat beside him and slowing back down to a safe speed. All the good he tried to do and nobody appreciated it. That was the last time he was going to put life and limb at risk for anybody. He'd been thoroughly distracted by the fruitless conversation, and the pressure of responding to official questions made him very nervous. Besides, he hated it whenever anyone implied that his eyesight was going. He slowed even further and put on his flashers, trying to calm his jangled nerves.

It was really starting to rain hard now. Water pounded on the windshields and road surface, and splashed back into the air as fine mist, creating instant fog and reducing visibility to a car-length or less. People sat up next to the wheel and craned their heads to peer over the water piling up at the bottom of their windshields. Traffic continued to slow to allow for the rain, but was still doing fifty, except for the old guy, who was doing close to thirty.

Suzie slowed, too. There was a lot of water on the road, and more coming out of the sky every second. Rain poured onto the road from nearby embankments and crossed six  lanes of traffic in search of a storm drain, which was blocked by the sheer volume of water lined up waiting to go into the sewer. Water pooled on the road. Suddenly tires started to loose traction.

Suzie felt her wheels slip, and, realizing she was starting to hydroplane, took her foot off the accelerator and let her car slow to thirty-five. All around her other cars did the same, except for the fools in the fast lane who insisted on passing even in a downpour.

More than a mile up the road, right beyond the exit for Central Avenue, the newly-licensed teenaged driver hit a sheet of water doing seventy-five. He was in the passing lane at the time, taking the tightly packed, slow-moving cars as a challenge and veering ever more sloppily around them. Hitting a sheet of water at seventy-five miles per hour is like jumping off a bridge. Water, being relatively incompressible, yields slowly to oncoming forces, and above a certain speed, yields as well as concrete. There was almost an inch and a half of water under his wheels, and the boy's tires were giving a good imitation of Jesus scaring his disciples out on the Red Sea.

Driving 101: When hydroplaning occurs, there is no friction available to brake, accelerate, or corner. A gust of wind or a slight turn can create an unpredictable and uncontrollable skid.

The kid felt his car start to slew around, hit his brakes in panic, and spun around like an ice-skater impressing the judges. He whanged against the fender of a gold Dodge Ram in the next lane, and then went twirling into the barrier wall. He bounced several times, leaving ragged black scrape marks on the concrete, and finally stopped facing oncoming traffic, his hood crumpled and torn, his radiator blown, his passenger side caved in, his front tires flat, his airbag activated, and various other dents and blemishes covering his car. Including some fresh blue paint, streaking in the rain.

An hour later, Suzie crawled past the scene, one of a thousand cars and trucks who had to sit stopped on the highway in the pouring rain, waiting for a chance to snake past what would come to the notice of investigators as the first official incident involving the Atlanta Sniper: fire engines and ambulances, police cars with blue lights, police cars with red lights, police cars with orange lights, a very destroyed black mustang in the left shoulder, and news copters circling.

 

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 next chapter, work begins to suck